Archive for November 29, 2011

To test XenClient on functionality I got a test laptop from my employer. It’s a Lenovo T520 with an i5, a 256Gb SSD disk and 16Gb ram. Enough power to have a good test! When I got this laptop I wanted to install the software but it’s only provided as ISO (DVD image) so I had to burn a DVD to install XenClient 2.0. I would like to have an ISO which can be extracted to USB storage so I wouldn’t have to burn a DVD anymore, although I know there are solutions to do this yourself I like it if a vendor delivers this for you.

I often publish a desktop in my projects and most of the times the new favorites folder in the explorer has to be removed because it’s not easily managed. I found the following method is pretty straightforward and works too.

Yuri Haak and a couple of other smart guys figured this out on the RESUG forum so I took their tips and made some automation possible. To change the reg keys that can remove the favorites from the explorer you first have to change the rights on the registry key, I did this by using Helge Klein’s SetACL which is an easy tool for such small (but tricky) adjustments.

At one of my current projects I was asked to take a look at a Citrix XenApp 6.5 server that couldn’t be loaded into a vDisk. When I ran the wizard to create a vDisk from the XenApp machine to a newly installed Citrix PVS 6 server I got the following error: “Server did not respond to a request in time”.

Today on of my colleagues was telling me about a Windows 7 deployment that was configured trough GPP but he noticed that not all the GPP settings where set somehow. He found a quick fix by removing the user from all the groups he was nested in, log the user in and add the user to all the groups again. When I heard this problem I knew I had seen this before in an environment with users in +200 nested groups in Windows 2008 R2. So I told him it could be the MaxTokenSize that has to be set to a proper value, Microsoft has an KB article to do so.

I had to create a script to backup the Citrix policies, in order to do this I had to use the Citrix.GroupPolicy.Commands.psm1. Before I could use them I had to install the XenApp SDK, because I had to run this script from every Citrix XA server I wanted to create an unattended install of the SDK. I added a zipfile with the extracted XASD60.exe here.

The last couple of days I had some great discussions with co-workers and some (VMware minded) guys on Twitter. The subject? The complexity of setting up Citrix XenDesktop, most of them refer to some demo they saw or things they’ve read on blogs/twitter etc while they know View is pretty easy to configure. But the thing is that those demo’s are mostly from a VMware View point of view and in the comparissons I’ve seen, Citrix PVS is used instead of Citrix MCS.